


Superposition

by m_class



Category: Star Trek: Voyager
Genre: Aliens in distress, Also the command team squeezes in some introspection, Brief discussion of Caretaker character deaths, Description of not-too-serious injury, Especially Chakotay, Gen, Minor Original Character(s), Missing Episode (it is prose though not a script), Oh and Harry does die...but he gets better, RED ALERT!, Racing the clock, Technobabble, That’s pretty much the wrap for warnings, cause he's like that
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-11
Updated: 2016-03-11
Packaged: 2018-05-26 01:31:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,972
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6218359
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/m_class/pseuds/m_class
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A "missing episode" (prose, not script) set between 'Parallax' and 'Time and Again.' As things settle down on Voyager, Chakotay and Janeway are just beginning to confront the more painful differences between Starfleet and Maquis when one of Voyager's routine scans triggers a technological disaster of apocalyptic proportions in a passing alien civilization. While Janeway and her away team race against time to save two planets, a subspace-smeared Harry Kim, and themselves, she and Chakotay face an unsettling question: can you truly trust someone who has an entirely different view of your shared reality?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Superposition

“This isn’t the twenty-third century, Chakotay.” Lieutenant Ndukari had gripped the back of the chair as he spoke, the tension of his fingers against the synthetic wood belying the calm of his tone. “The Federation isn’t the little kid in the sandbox, sending cowboy captains out into the galaxy to have shootouts with Klingons and lecture the rest of the universe on right and wrong. The Federation is a political entity of immense scope and immense responsibility. Responsibility to _all_ of its people.”

“Responsibility? Is that what you call this? A treaty that covers the Federation’s backside and lets the colony worlds go hang?” Even now, Chakotay can remember searching his crewmate’s eyes for any sign that this man who had signed up to safeguard the people of the Federation was actually hearing the words coming from his own mouth.

“Sometimes difficult decisions will have to be made, but they’re made by people who have the principles of the Federation at heart.”

“Difficult decisions?” Chakotay had snarled. “Or cowardly ones?”

The conversation had degenerated from there.

Still, there _had_ been a flicker of something in Ndukari’s eyes to match the tension in his stance. Guilt, perhaps, Chakotay had thought at the time, or even shame. Later, as sparks showered the bridge of the _Val Jean_ and he shouted for Torres to reroute power to shields against Starfleet torpedoes, Chakotay had wondered if he’d only seen what he’d hoped to see. Had Ndukari felt any hesitation, when news of the treaty and the subsequent rumors of Maquis movement first winged their way across subspace? Had their captain? Had others? Or had all the Starfleet officers hailing from comfortable worlds far from Cardassian space shrugged and said, _Sometimes difficult decisions will have to be made?_

Now, as he makes his way along the clean and spacious corridors of the Federation Starship Voyager toward the ready room of Starfleet Captain Janeway, Chakotay finds himself wondering what words would have been exchanged if it had been Janeway in the conference room that day, rather than Ndukari. For all he knows about her, or would like to think he knows, that’s a question that he doesn’t think he can really answer. Yet.

He’d heard of her, before she first appeared on the viewscreen of the _Val Jean_ eight days ago. Few in Starfleet hadn’t. Captain Janeway of the U.S.S. _Meitner_ , who successfully made first contact with the nebula-dwelling Lanatus. Captain Janeway, who saved the lives of 114 Starfleet personnel held hostage near an unstable red dwarf. Captain Janeway, who sacrificed their way home with Chakotay’s full support, because to do otherwise would have doomed an innocent people to destruction. It was his knowledge of Janeway’s character that led him to agree to serve as her first officer, and that knowledge has continued to give him comfort over the first week of their long journey, even through their first shaky days of staffing disagreements.

“Bridge.”

As the turbolift ascends, he wonders why this knowledge of her character now stirs a quiet anger that niggles at the back of his mind like a hard-to-scratch itch. Captain Janeway is the good sort of Starfleet captain, the kind who believes in exploration and diplomacy and the value of life. The kind who follows Federation principals. The kind who follows her Starfleet orders and who, like her fellow good captains, would have very civilly hunted and tractored the _Val Jean_ and brought him and his crew in alive. Or, at least, mostly alive.

They almost always did, the Starfleet captains who engaged Maquis ships. Casualties came from impact injuries and internal conduit explosions, not excessive use of force by Starfleet. The Federation was the Federation, at the end of the day, not the Cardassians.

They still hung on to some of their principles. They all _thought_ they were hanging on to _all_ of their principles. Sometimes, as he’d sat at the table of their sole cramped common area, gazing at the familiar stars floating past the _Val Jean_ ’s viewport, Chakotay had wondered if that was what angered him most of all.

***

Janeway shifts in her chair, frowning at the report in front of her. She slipped onto the bridge halfway through gamma shift, ignoring Tuvok’s disapproving look as she stopped by the big chair to pick up the night’s reports. Now she’s nearly at the bottom of the pile, and beginning to regret the lack of sleep as the letters of the waste management report blur and swim across the PADD screen.

The door chimes. Chakotay enters at her invitation.

“Good morning, Commander.”

“Good morning. Getting a bit of an early start, aren’t you?”

She returns his smile. “I don’t much like to have my finger off the pulse for two whole shifts when we’re tens of thousands of light years from backup.”

“A shift and a half. You were here well into beta.”

“As were you. I suspect we’ll all be burning the gamma oil until we get all our ops and personnel wrinkles ironed out.”

He accedes the point with a nod, settling into the chair in front of her desk. “What’s on our plates for today?”

“We’re a little less than eight hours away from a system with two m-class planets and a gas giant with several m-class moons. One species appears to have expanded across both planets at least, but though they’re space-faring, it’s a pre-warp civilization.”

“So, no contact.”

“No contact.”

“Anything else?”

“Sorting through the complaints from Engineering. The first two were from my—from Starfleet people. But a Liri Seska just filed a somewhat convoluted complaint, the gist of which seems to be that I’m setting Torres up to fail. I thought it might be better if you…”

Chakotay sighs. “I’ll talk to her.”

“Other than that, under regs either of us can sign off on repairs as they’re completed. Now that critical systems have been checked and double-checked, it’s diagnostics and peripherals. And—” She hesitates.

“Is something going on?” His voice is low.

“No. No.” She shakes her head. “I’ve started planning the ceremony for those we lost in the jump to the Delta Quadrant. Half of the Starfleet personnel have at least one old friend or acquaintance in the crew who responded to the all hands memo I sent out yesterday. I’ll be the one to draw from personnel files and say a few words for the rest. Three of your original crew have crewmates jostling for a chance to speak in their memory. But I didn’t have a response for…” She consults a PADD, the only one on her desk far more difficult to look at than the waste management report, for a very different reason. “Para Yoru or Lacinda James.”

“They two were our latest additions. Even after Tuvok.” He glances out the viewport. “We took them on to replace the crew we lost in the last engagement before the fight that sent us into the Badlands.” The words linger a moment in the air of the ready room, and Janeway feels something inside her stiffen. _Our last engagement._ The way he looked away from her, the way his body almost imperceptibly tensed, the way he didn’t say something more specific, like _lost to the Cardassians_ … An engagement with Starfleet.

“I can say a few words, if you still don’t have any responses by the day of the funeral,” he finishes, breaking the uncomfortable silence.

“Thank you.”

There’s another moment of silence between them, the comfortable conversation of a few moments ago feeling almost as many light-years away as the colony worlds themselves.

“I think,” she says finally, setting her face into a neutral expression and meeting his eyes, “that that’s everything. I need to finish reviewing this waste report, then I’ll meet you on the bridge.”

He nods. His expression isn’t hostile, either, and his voice is as mild and even as it was before as he replies, “I’ll see you there.”

***

As the door slides shut behind him, Janeway reaches up to massage her temples, a hopeful attempt to ward off the tension headache suddenly forming behind her eyes. She glances at the clock. 06:02, only two minutes after her day was technically supposed to begin. The waste report beckons, but it’s even harder to focus on the swimming letters now than it was before Chakotay’s entrance. Giving it up for the moment, she leans back in her chair, gazing out at the stars of the Delta Quadrant as they flash by her starship. Her Federation starship.

They might be all in the same boat now, literally and figuratively. But only weeks ago, her people were receiving the details of their assignment to _Voyager_ , packing their belongings and preparing to shuttle over from other secure and well-staffed Federation starships and stations, and _his_ people were fighting and dying in combat with Cardassians. And the Federation.

Janeway sighs. It’s all too easy, even for her, to fall into the mental trap of simplifying her mixed crew into rebels and rule-followers, ruly and unruly. As though they’re a couple of elementary school capture-the-flag teams who have to learn to cooperate, rather than two groups of adults whose very significant, quite deliberate personal choices led them to either the _Val Jean_ or the U.S.S. _Voyager_. Many of those differences in principles have been forged by trauma and painful pasts, hard work, and deep convictions—on both sides of the divide.

The fires are out, the staffing decisions are made, and they’re all settling in for a very long journey. Will the relative peace only provide an opportunity for deeper differences between Starfleet and Maquis to rise up and bite them all in the collective ass?

Hell, what about the fundamental differences between _Voyager_ ’s captain and first officer? After all, leading a Starfleet ship is about more than technical knowledge, combat readiness, or even command ability. To be a Starfleet officer is to value and uphold the principles of the Federation.

Janeway scrubs her eyes with the back of her hand. The fact of the matter is that when Chakotay and the other ex-‘Fleet Maquis made the choice to resign their Starfleet commissions, they betrayed those principles, no matter how noble their rationale for doing so. To be Starfleet is to acknowledge the value of life, yes, but also to honor the fact that, as Ambassador Spock famously put it, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. By choosing to fight for _their_ people at the expense of _all_ the people, the Starfleet-Maquis converts chose to put the needs of their few before the very real diplomatic—and, ultimately, strategic—needs of the Federation’s many.

She’s read Chakotay’s file. She’s seen him in action, and now, she’s shared a week’s worth of command decisions with him. He’s smart, he’s brave, he’s capable, he has experience as a Starfleet officer, he’s a man of principle—and most of his principles are hers as well. For the last eight days, she’s been deeply thankful that, of all the Maquis captains she could have been stranded with in the Delta Quadrant, she ended up with him.

Yet no matter much she respects him, the plain fact remains that when he came to the fork in the road, Chakotay made the choice that Janeway never would.

_What happens when we come to the next fork?_

It would be nice to think they might complete their seventy-year journey home without such a test of shared principles. It also seems unlikely.

***

“Red alert. All hands, brace for impact!”

As the corridor lighting dims and alarms begin to sound, Ayala barely has time to drop and brace himself against the corridor wall before the promised impact reverberates through the Starfleet vessel. He waits a count of five, but no further impact comes, and the captain’s voice gives no further warning over the intercom.

Picking himself up, he reverses course, heading away from the turbolift and towards the nearest entrance to the Jeffries tubes. Three minutes later, he’s arriving at the bridge, which is currently both tense and slightly overstaffed. Ayala is the last of beta shift to arrive, but a few alpha shift personnel are waiting for orders rather than wandering off in the thick of a crisis.

“Can you determine the source of the shockwave yet?”

“Sensors still coming back online, Captain.” Ayala gives the young ensign at Ops an approving look as the kid’s fingers fly confidently over the panels.

“Captain, we are receiving a distress call,” announces the conn officer.

“Open a channel.”

The face on the other end is humanoid, but purplish-grey and very thin. If this species shows emotion in the same way humans do, the owner of this face is also very afraid.

“I am Captain Kathryn Janeway of the Federation starship Voyager. We received your distress call.”

“I am Baron Musil of Enuyux. Our generator on the second moon of Pejora—this gas planet—is overloading. The first shockwave killed most of the plant’s operators.” The alien speaks quickly, eyes creased in panic and anger. “It was your technology that caused this implosion.”

Janeway’s eyes narrow. “Explain.”

“You sent out a wave-based subspace signal. No ship passing through our space has ever interfered with subspace before.”

“I assure you, Baron, that no sabotage was intended. What type of energy generation could possibly be affected by a subspace scan?”

“Our Pejora generator,” the Baron responds coldly, “runs on space-subspace superposition.”

The must mean something more to Janeway than it does to Ayala, because her eyes widen. “I understand. I assure you, my people had never dreamed that such a technology could be a feasible large-scale means of energy generation,” she continues, forming her words quickly but carefully. “Because of this, we have no data on how destructive a routine subspace scan could be to such an energy generation system. As it stands, our interference in your technology was completely accidental. Baron Musil, I apologize deeply for this accident and its effects.”

“If the control systems fail in the main subspace superposition chamber, the implosion will tear the moon apart and decimate our population center on Petchul, the fifth planet from our sun. It is too late to undo the damage, Captain Kathryn Janeway of Voyager. If you truly bear our people no ill will, will you help us to evacuate Petchul?”

“We will do what we can, Baron. Mr. Paris, lay in a course for the fifth planet.”

“Aye, Captain.”

“Baron Musil, how long until the implosion?”

“We estimate seventeen minutes at most, and no less than nine minutes.” The alien’s voice wavers slightly.

“Thank you, Baron.” The captain turns to the Ops station. “Mr. Kim, how many people will we be able to transport off Petchul?”

The young ensign’s hands flash once more over the panels, then he looks up, eyes dark. “Uhm…none, Captain. The atmosphere has too many heavy ions for the transporter beam to penetrate. I’m having trouble even getting sensor readings from the surface.”

Janeway whirls to face Tuvok at Tactical. “Tuvok, can we safely land the ship on Petchul?”

“Captain, I am afraid that even at maximum speeds, we will not have time to land a shuttle, much less the ship, on the planet’s surface before the second generator implosion. The chance that we will be able to modify the transporters sufficiently to transport the occupants to safety is almost zero, but appears to be the only viable alternative.”

“Tell Torres to get on it. Ensign Kim, does the moon’s atmosphere also block our transporter beam?”

“Negative, Captain.”

“Would we be able to transport a team down?”

“Yes, ma—Captain.”

“Don’t worry, Mr. Kim, I think this can safely be considered crunch time. Reopen a channel,” she adds, raising her voice again.

Before the Baron can speak, Janeway asks sharply, "If I send a team to help control your generator, will you be willing share all your data on the facility?”

“Yes, Captain.”

Janeway turns from the viewscreen. “Mr. Kim, Mr. Ayala, Mr. Tuvok, Ms. Townsend, you’re with me.” She slaps her combadge. “Lieutenant Torres, meet me in Transporter Room One with four of your staff. Bring anyone with any experience with space-subspace superposition. Commander, you have the bridge.”

Ayala catches the look on Harry Kim’s face as the young Starfleet ensign follows their captain past him towards the turbolift. Excitement, anxiety and determination war for position on his features, and for a moment, he looks very young indeed. Ayala realizes, startled, that if he’s right in his rough estimate of Harry Kim’s age, the ensign is about as close in age to Ayala’s older son as he is to Ayala.

He glances back toward the frightened grey alien face on the viewscreen. _Good luck, kid. Looks like we might need it._   

***

As they step out of the turbolift and head for Transporter Room One, Harry finds himself half-jogging to keep up with Captain Janeway’s brisk strides.

“Do any of you,” she calls over her shoulder to the bridge group, just as Torres and her team round the corner and converge with them, “have any experience with space-subspace superposition?”

"Superposition? As in two stimuli to a system producing the sum of both their responses?" he asks hopefully.

She shakes her head. "Subspace superposition has nothing to do with the linear superposition principle. It's the macro equivalent of quantum superposition. A whole different animal. In space-subspace energy generation, two space and subspace beams are superposed, and combine to form a beam that exists in superspace, outside of reality. Energy is generated when the superspace beam is coalesced back to one reality or the other."

"Did you understand any of that, Maquis?" Harry mutters to B’Elanna as the away team members climb onto the transporter pad. She throws him a superior—and highly reassuring—smirk.

"Every word, Starfleet.”

They rematerialize just outside the Pejora generator. The alien technology itself is housed in a blocky structure low to the surface of the scrubby indigo moon, with several rickety-looking towers thrusting up from the far corner of the base. One corner of the base structure has nearly completely collapsed, and the taller tower is crumbling slightly, its top swathed in acrid smoke.

Brandishing a PADD loaded with the schematics provided by Baron Musil, Torres leads the way into the center of the structure, beelining for the main control panel. Harry can’t help but stop and stare for just an instant when he sees the converging space-subspace beams themselves, filling a huge, undulating containment field in the center of the chamber, glowing and shaking and strangely yellow.

“Runaway process,” comes Janeway’s voice from behind him. “The containment field shouldn’t be bulging that way. We don’t have much time.”

One of the engineers hands him a phaser-like tool to douse a beam gun near the side of the room, and Harry isn’t sure how long he works before a strange noise-but-not-noise begins to whine in his ear and a force moving outward from the direction of the generator begins to lap around his body, like an ocean made of static electricity. The not-phaser is ripped from his hands, and he can feel the hair on his head standing straight up.

“It’s about to blow!” someone yells, and Harry squints into the maelstrom, spotting B’Elanna Torres still standing at the control panel, braced against a rail as she fights to move her hands over the buttons. Closing his eyes, Harry leans into the force, fighting his way over to her.

“What can I do?”

“Get out of here, Starfleet!” The waves from the generator flow around B’Elanna’s body, coating it as though she was encased in glass. As she moves her hand over the panel, fingers clenched and tendons straining, it ripples like she's pulling it through water.

“I’m not going anywhere, Maquis!”

“Harry, you’re a fucking p’tak!”

“Probably!”

Her straining fingers connect two buttons. The white noise lessens somewhat, and a button at the upper left of the control panel, next to the bulging, rippling containment field, begins to flash blue. With her left hand, Torres pushes towards it, now trembling with exhaustion as well as the force of the generator. Harry leans forward, watching his own hand ripple as he shoves it through the putty-like air, fighting to reach. When his fingers finally compress the button, the blue flashing stops. As he draws his arm away, the containment field warbles, and the yellowish light brushes the middle knuckle of his hand.

He is inside out. The universe is yellow and upside down. Chakotay stands up from his chair, calling to Paris, “Prepare to go to warp,” and Harry’s mother is walking across her backyard, red-eyed, staring up into the night sky. He watches from behind and in front and above, detached, as Torres flies backwards, smashing into Captain Janeway, the whole team scattered back like birdseed from a giant’s hand. The whole team, except himself. _Where am I?_ The world is hot, then cold, then yellow again, then collapses in on itself into everything and nothing at all.

***

For the second time in a week, Janeway opens her eyes to smoke and sparks, the impression of crumpled bodies in Starfleet uniforms. _I’m dreaming, I’m back when he first pulled us into the Delta Quadrant, how did I get back…_ She shakes her head to clear it, pushing herself upright. The alien moon. The generator.

The nearest body belongs to B’Elanna Torres. Janeway presses two fingers to her throat, relief coursing through her as a strong pulse pushes back against her fingertips. She runs her tricorder over the younger woman, frowning at the readings, before turning to find the rest of the away team.

Tuvok and Townsend lie on her other side, further from the generator. Tuvok is already stirring as she runs the tricorder over them, getting far more pedestrian readings from both.

“Captain. What is our status?”

“We patched the controls. The generator is holding. For now. No, try and lie still for a moment, old friend. I’m sure I’ll have demands for you in a minute; take the rest you can get.” She turns back to the generator. Lieutenant Ayala is running a tricorder over the unconscious forms of the other four engineers.

“How are they?”

“Alive.” Ayala sits back on his heels. “I’ve seen something this before. My crewmates got hit with an experimental energy weapon." He gestures to the prone engineers. "Looking at these readings, the generator scrambled them the same way. If I'm right...they’ll be all right, but we won’t be able to wake them for a good day or so.”

“We don’t really have the luxury of a day’s wait. Do you know if it will harm them to try and wake them?”

“I don’t believe it’ll have an effect at all, Captain,” he warns.

Janeway fishes in the first aid kit for a hypospray, pressing it against Torres’ neck.

“Lieutenant.” She shakes the woman by the shoulder. “ _B’Elanna_.” The treatment has the non-effect Ayala promised.

“Captain?” comes a soft voice from behind her.

“Crewman Townsend. How do you feel?” Relief at evidence of any member of her crew’s wellbeing dwarves a pang of annoyance that none of the waking crew members happens to be an engineer. Of course, the engineers were the ones standing close enough to the generator to get fried. The engineers and—

“I’ll—I’ll be all right.”

Townsend looks shaken, and Janeway remembers that this is her first deep space mission. “Good show, crewman,” she says, trying to sound warm without being condescending.

“Are _you_ all right, Captain?”

Janeway follows Ayala’s gaze towards her own right shoulder, and looks down to see a large, charred-edge hole in her jacket. Pulling at the burn hole in her uniform with the fingers of her left hand, she squints in the dim light at the skin underneath. No charring or waxiness, just the dark red swathe of a superficial second-degree burn. “Not anything to worry about. Where’s Ensign Kim?”

Ayala glances around. Townsend, seeming somewhat emboldened by her captain’s praise, rises to her feet, peering around the smoky control room before whipping out a tricorder. She shakes her head. “I can’t find him.” She turns in a slow circle, holding the tricorder in front of her. “He’s not here.”

Janeway slaps her combadge. “Janeway to Kim.”

Silence.

“Janeway to Kim.” She pushes herself to her feet, stepping over Torres towards the generator control panel. After a few minute’s perusal, she slaps her combadge again, wondering whether the subspace interference from the generator has cleared enough to allow her signal to reach _Voyager_. “Janeway to Chakotay.”

“Chakotay here. What is your status, away team?”

His voice is faint, but clear. She raises hers, addressing him and the rest of the away team simultaneously.

“We controlled the process, but didn’t shut it down. By these readings, we have between forty-seven and forty-nine minutes until the generator blows again. The only logical conclusion to draw about Harry Kim's complete and instantaneous disappearance is that he came into contact with the containment field and is trapped in superspace along with the superposed space and subspace beams. The beam guns in here are shot, but if we can access the auxiliary beam guns in the upper towers, we should be able to jerry-rig a Copenhagen beam to coalesce the superposed matter into our reality. But we won’t be able to do it without Voyager. You need to set up a subspace beam to amplify the auxiliary Enuyux beam once we get it going. That should allow us to stabilize the process for long enough to power it down once and for all.”

After Chakotay signals his acknowledgement and signs off, Ayala asks, “Copenhagen beam?”

“Named for the ancient quantum mechanics concept. It pulls the superposed matter back into reality.”

“Into space. Not subspace,” Townsend says, half clarifying question, half plea.

Janeway shakes her head. “Even if we can get the reactor working, it’s a fifty percent chance it will coalesce into our physical reality. Nothing more.”

“So Harry is Schrodinger’s Ensign,” Ayala murmurs. His voice is as calm as it was before, but she’s startled by the intensity in his eyes as he stares at the smoking machinery. “Dead and alive. Until the beam coalesces.”

There is nothing she can do but nod.

***

“Chakotay to away team.”

Janeway is puttering with the control panel, so Tuvok taps his combadge. “Tuvok here.”

“Bad news. Engineering doesn’t think we’ll be able to communicate, much less transport, once the generator starts up again. We need to get you out now.”

“We must remain in order to undo the damage caused by our interference, however accidental, in this culture,” he responds. “We cannot simply be ‘gotten out.’ The Prime Directive is clear. However, Torres, Barker, Vorrik, Carlile and Uste are unconscious and should be beamed directly to Sickbay.”

“Acknowledged. Transporter Room One is energizing. But—Tuvok, I have some news about…that…as well.” The gravity in his voice is such that Tuvok sees Janeway instantly still her work at the control panel, waiting.

Joe Carey’s voice crackles across the comm. “This overload was going to happen anyway.”

“Our readings before we left indicated that Musil was telling the truth,” Janeway responds, turning to face the away team as she speaks across the comm.

“She was. About that overload at that instant. But what you did to fix it, _it should have worked._ There’s no reason for the generator to be heading out of control again, except that it was doomed to happen anyway. We’ve run several simulations. Multiple components in the main control system were failing; an overload was likely today and inevitable by tomorrow. Space-subspace energy generation is dangerous. They’ve been riding for a fall ever since they laid the foundation for that facility.”

Janeway draws herself up. “Be that as it may, thanks to _our_ accidental interference this morning, the people who maintain this plant are dead now. The facility is collapsing. There is smoke in the air. To all intents and purposes, we caused this crisis. Even if it would have occurred without us, now or soon, it would not have occurred in the same way without our interference. The Prime Directive is indeed clear: we undo the damage we have done.”

“We will proceed with your original orders, Captain,” says Chakotay, after a brief pause.

Tuvok detects surprise in the former Maquis captain’s voice, and feels uncertain as to its source. Though Tuvok has the benefit of a longer acquaintance with Kathryn Janeway, Chakotay witnessed her decision to destroy the Caretaker’s array, sacrificing the safety and convenience of her ship and crew for an alien species. It would be logical for him to assume she would make a similar decision again. Then again, humans do not base their decisions—never mind their instinctual perceptions—upon logic. Tuvok decides that it is logical to surmise that the human man’s broader history of conflict with Starfleet clouds his perception of all Starfleet officers towards the negative.

“I have five intact and breathing engineers in Sickbay,” crackles the holographic doctor’s voice faintly over the comm. Ayala laughs in relief, and Townsend lets out a weak “Whoohoo!”

Janeway taps her combadge. “Chakotay, can you still read?”

“Yes, Captain.” The first officer’s voice is faint and scratchy.

“Get that beam up, but if you can’t, just get the ship to a safe distance.”

“—s Capt—” His voice stutters and fades out.

“All right then.” Janeway turns to face the other three, putting her hands on her hips. “Ayala and Townsend, stay here to activate the regular beams from this control. Once we get the auxiliary subspace guns on, we’ll climb back down and meet you when Voyager comes back for our beamout,” she tells them, her voice round with the tones of command. Ayala meets her eyes and nods, and Townsend squares her shoulders.

“ _Captain_ ,” says Tuvok quietly, as the other two head towards the control panel.

“Is something wrong, Tuvok?”

“I have noticed,” he responds, weighing his words carefully, “that humans, particularly those in command of a large group, will often use the plural first-person pronoun to refer to the group as a whole, or even a subset of the group of which they themselves are not personally a part. May I take it that your current use of the word “we” falls under this usage category?”

“Tuvok, there are two towers, not one. I’m _going_ to the auxiliary beam guns with you.” Janeway’s eyes are steely and her voice is absolutely even. “You and I are the only people left on this away team with a halfway decent understanding of space-subspace superposition. A singed arm won’t prevent me from making the climb.”

“Your arm is slightly more than ‘singed,’ Captain.”

“And the clock is ticking. Tuvok, don’t worry. I’ll be just fine.”

“Vulcans do not worry, Captain.”

She smiles crookedly at him. “Thank goodness for _that_. Be ready to activate your beam at my signal.”

“Yes, Captain.”

“And take care.”

“Yes, Captain.”

***   

Janeway pulls herself up another rung, then another, climbing up through the silent dark. Below, Ayala and Townsend are preparing the containment field to receive her jerry-rigged auxiliary beam, to her right, Tuvok climbs toward the other auxiliary beam gun, and far above, Chakotay and the engineers of _Voyager_ are preparing to amplify it with their own subspace beam.

She hopes.

She kept all doubt out of her voice when addressing her little skeleton crew, but she has no way to guarantee that Chakotay will go through with her final order. They and the people of Petchul have a slim chance of survival even if the plan works. If _Voyager_ doesn’t give them the beam, they have nothing.

She grabs for the next rung viciously, thinking of Kim and Townsend’s faces the first time each stepped onto her bridge, excited and anxious and incredibly young. _Harry. Melissa. I’m sorry it had to be you, trapped here with me. I would have sent you both back to Voyager, if I could._

Only this morning, she had hoped that their journey would let her and Chakotay skate along, at least for a while, without throwing the differences between them into their faces. Now, alone, climbing a rusty alien ladder through the darkness, she has to face the facts that have been niggling at the back of her mind for days: Chakotay isn’t just someone who made a different choice from her. He’s a Starfleet officer who turned his back on Starfleet, and, in Janeway’s experience with the bad apples in the 'Fleet barrel, that rarely means anything good. There are some officers who can only safely be reported, controlled, or avoided. All she knows of Chakotay tells her he isn’t one of them, not in the worst way. Still, he left Starfleet. He made that choice. And the choice he made, when he joined the Maquis, was to look out for his own people at the expense of the rest.

If Chakotay orders them to pull out now, the ship will stay safe, the Prime Directive will remain definitively unbroken, and Chakotay will be in command. He will lose her and three of her people, and only one of his. Ship’s safety and Prime Directive aside, would the Starfleet crew reproach him for leaving their captain to die? She is sure some of them would. But under the circumstances, most of them would have little cause to blame him. With greater or lesser reluctance, they would follow him. Follow him home…

One-twenty-one. One-twenty-two. By her original reckoning of the ladder's height, she’s nearly halfway to the top. There’s still no pain from her shoulder, just stiffness and a sensation of pressure—a bad sign. She revises her estimate; deep second-degree burn, hopefully no worse.

Grunting, she hoists herself further up the ladder, the muscles in her put-upon left arm screaming as she wraps her fingers around one rung, then the next rung, then the next.

***

Tuvok beats her back to the ground. As Janeway drops the final few feet down the tower ladder, less gracefully than she had hoped, she sees him already helping Townsend and Ayala to align the beams. Forcing her sore, dehydrated body into a jog, she makes her way over to them, feeling a spark of hope as she sees the system power up before she even arrives. They’re making it work. This is actually going to work.

If _Voyager_ stayed and provided the beam, anyway. Until the moment of truth six to eight minutes from now, there’s no way to tell for sure whether their aux subspace beams are being subtly amplified, or not.

“Ready to begin energizing the Copenhagen beam, Captain,” Tuvok reports.

“All right. Good work, everyone.” She smiles at each of them in turn before turning her attention to the control panel. It blurs briefly, and she closes her eyes for a moment. She must be more dehydrated than she thought. Opening her eyes, she hovers her fingers over the final initiation sequence, checking the universal translator one more time before tapping the green button to activate the beam.

“Is it going to work?” Townsend asks softly.

Janeway reaches over to grip the young woman’s shoulder. “I very much hope so. But we won’t know until it does.” _Or doesn’t._

In the center of the arc, the Copenhagen beam flickers. Janeway glances down at the readings on the control panel again, then up to the dark sky, her free hand working its way up to fiddle with her silent combadge as she waits for one of two possibilities to coalesce into reality.

***

Chakotay feels the entire bridge draw breath, bracing themselves, as the seconds tick away towards the end of the allotted minimum forty-seven minutes.

“Ready to go to warp at my signal, Lieutenant.”

“Aye, sir.” Paris’s voice is grim.

“The amp beam?”

The ensign at Ops nods. “Still steady, sir. They’ve had it for thirty minutes now. That should be more than enough.” If the away team weren’t working with pocketknives and flint in a burnt-out generator, if they weren’t bruised and injured, if everything goes miraculously, perfectly right planetside—the words go unsaid, but Chakotay is afraid everyone in the room is thinking them.

“It’s a good team we’ve got down there.” He can sense, rather than see, the bridge respond to the calm of his tone, a shoulder relaxing here, a breath let out there. “If anyone can do it— _they can_.”

“Forty-six minutes,” reports the Ops officer, after a few seconds.

The bridge is silent for the next few minutes as they wait for a world to explode. Forty-seven minutes pass, then forty-eight. Chakotay feels sweat drip down his forehand. He is not going to lose Ayala, Tuvok, his new captain, and two other good crew on their second major mission in the Delta Quadrant. It will not happen. The away team _is_ competent, and those on _Voyager_  have done what they can, and it will not happen. It will not.

“Forty-nine minutes.”

The next sixty seconds pass in a haze, and it’s only after the announcement of “Fifty-two minutes” that the bridge started to unfreeze, shock and hope crossing the faces of those around him. It’s not until one hour has passed since the time Janeway told them the generator would blow in forty-seven to forty-nine minutes that Chakotay risks giving the order to take them within comm range.

“Chakotay to Janeway.”

Silence.

“Chakotay to away team.”

Silence.

“Lieutenant, takes us closer.”

“Aye, sir.”

Chakotay finds himself leaning toward the viewscreen, his own calm bleeding away from him, despite his best efforts, now that the ship is no longer in such dire need of his confidence and composure. “ _Chakotay to away team_.”

“I’m bringing us into orbit thirty-one kilometers above the moon’s surface, sir.”

“Chakotay to away team. Away team, come in.”

The transmission crackles for a moment, then falls silent. Chakotay forces himself to take a deep breath.

“Captain Janeway, _come in_.”

“Commander.”

As Harry Kim’s voice fills the bridge, Chakotay can almost hear the collective sigh of final, ultimate relief filling the bridge. Smiles are breaking out all around, and though Chakotay can’t see Tom Paris’s face, the helmsman’s shoulders relax visibly.

“Ensign Kim. Status report.”

The young man’s voice is impressively steady for a green ensign recently returned from the dead. “The generator itself is fully powered down, sir. We’re powering down the Copenhagen beam now and will be ready to transport in moments. Captain Janeway is injured, but all members of the away team are alive and present.”

“Does she need a direct transport to Sickbay?”

“ _She_ does not,” Janeway’s voice cuts in. “We’re all upright, Commander.” Even over the comm, he can hear a smile in her voice as well. “Five to beam up.”

***

Chakotay strides into Sickbay just as the EMH is setting down the dermal regenerator. “Captain, is this a good time for a quick report?”

“I’m afraid it’s not _her_ permission you need to worry about.” The holographic doctor steps squarely between them, blocking Janeway’s view of her first officer. “ _I_ am in charge of this sickbay and _I_ am currently examining my _patient_. I’m sure that whatever you need to discuss can wait.”

“You just fixed my arm,” Janeway points out hopefully.

“After the captain of a vessel with a serious injury goes _flinging_ themselves about on an alien planet, I’m afraid procedure dictates that she be given a full medical examination.”

Janeway scowls as she perches back on the edge of the biobed, and Chakotay’s mouth twitches in amusement. “ _May_ I please speak to the captain for a moment?” he asks the EMH politely, stepping further into the room.

“Well, as you seem determined to do so anyway, I doubt anything _I_ say will deter you. Go right ahead, do; don’t mind me. I’m only the Chief Medical Officer on this voyage of the damned…” He wanders off towards the office, still muttering.

“The EMH whisperer,” she mouths.

“Not really,” he mouths back, smiling.

“That was quite a first contact,” she says at regular volume, as casually as she can.

“You certainly handled things well down there,” he responds, a bit stiffly.

Silence reigns for a moment, and Janeway braces herself to bite the bullet. Pussyfooting around won’t help anything. Sooner or later, they’ve got to talk about this.

“Tuvok said,” she says in a low voice, “that you were surprised I gave the order to stay.”

He sighs, staring past her into the middle distance. “I guess I still wasn’t sure you would make that kind of choice. I know you’re a principled person, Captain, but so were the people who made the decision to throw my homeworld to the Cardassians.”

Well. There’s pussyfooting around, and then there’s that.

Not knowing what to say, she is silent for a moment, trying to frame a response. This isn’t the time for a political debate about the rightness of the Maquis cause, nor the time to express sympathy for him on Starfleet’s behalf. Perhaps, after a day in which both their actions evidently spoke louder than words, there isn’t anything left to say, really. But even if that’s true, she’s having a damn hard time figuring out how best not to say it.

Suddenly, he laughs.

“What?”

“Oh, nothing. Just an old memory I’ve been stewing on a bit over the last few days. An acquaintance of mine in Starfleet told me rather emphatically once, during a…discussion we were having, that we were all out of twenty-third century ‘cowboy captains’ in this day and age. After today, I’m wondering if all he’d’ve needed to do was get stranded in the Delta Quadrant with _just_ the right captain,” he grins at her, “to realize his mistake.”

She snorts. “Well. When we get back into subspace range, shall I send him a picture of myself on the bridge, all kitted out in my cowgirl hat and stirrup boots?”

Chakotay chuckles. “A page of your logs might be enough.”

They sit in silence for a minute after the laughter fades away. Reaching out, she gives his shoulder a light squeeze before folding her arms and meeting his eyes. “I realize it won’t always be easy. For either side of the crew. _Our_ crew. But I suspect we’ll be able to work it out.”

“Just take care that you don’t put yourself into a situation like that again,” he responds, giving her a hard look, “or there won’t _be_ a ‘we’ to work it out.”

Her eyebrows must lift, because he looks at her curiously. “What?”

“You just sound like such a ‘Fleet first officer, worrying over your captain’s safety.”

“I _am_ a ‘Fleet first officer.” There’s no bite to the words, though, just an amused smile, and she wonders again if she misjudged what was happening on _Voyager_ ’s bridge as she climbed through the dark.

“I didn’t mean to imply you weren’t.” She glances away, then meets his gaze, going for broke. “It was just…a little strange to hear you _fretting_ over the comm, after I’d been assuming the opposite.”

He frowns. “You thought I wouldn’t be worried about the away team?”

“I thought you might make the choice to leave.” She adds, quietly, “In many ways, I wouldn’t have blamed you.” Just as, in many ways, she had never blamed the Maquis for the choice they’d made, even if it would not have been her own.

Chakotay is staring at her. “So you saw that Torres and her people were beamed up, and then you climbed into that tower,” he asks softly, “thinking I might not even give the order that would give you and the skeleton team a fighting chance to survive?”

She chuckles sadly. “If you,” she said, “weren’t such an idealist, you’d have been thinking the same thing. When I thought it over, it seemed obvious—when you joined the Maquis, weren’t you saying that you valued _your_ people over _all_ the people? By sacrificing only one of your own, you could get rid of me and a ‘Fleet away team—all of whom were most likely at that point to be lost anyway, whether you tried to help us or not—and give yourself direct control over your people again. Do whatever you thought it would take to keep them safe and get them home. All in an Intrepid-class Starfleet ship with the support of a large Starfleet crew, most of whom would give you their full support under the circumstances.” She smiles, and, to lighten the mood, adds, “Now that I know you hadn’t even thought of it, I hope I’m not giving you any ideas…”

He doesn’t laugh.

She bites her lip.

He turns away, pacing toward the office, then back again to address her directly. “Because I was Maquis, you really thought my values might lead me to make that choice?”

“But from what I knew of you, it didn’t seem likely. And crewmates _need_ to trust each other. That’s a pretty important Starfleet principle, at the end of the day.” She meets his gaze evenly. “So I did.”

He turns away again, and she feels the slightest stab of guilt. “It wasn’t something I wanted to believe of you,” she adds in a low voice. “But I can’t assume something is the truth just because I’d like for it to be.”

He sighs, then shakes his head, the slightest of smiles softening his face again. “Given that I just admitted to expecting you to abandon Ensign Kim and the Enuyans… I can hardly reproach you for your doubts.”

They sit for a minute in silence. She’s not sure whether she would call it a comfortable silence, in the way their companionable silences over meals or report PADDs over the last week have been comfortable, but it’s light-years closer to one than the silence that fell in her ready room at the beginning of alpha shift. Then again, could the time they spent together over this last week really be called comfortable, if so much lurked beneath it, unsuspected and unvoiced?

“Thank you.”

He looks at her, surprised.

“I never really thanked you, for backing my decision to destroy the Caretaker’s array. Or for your willingness to see the need to run this crew as a Starfleet crew. Or for standing up to me on staffing and forcing me to see where I was wrong.”

He stares at her in surprise for another moment, then nods. “Thank you. For your open mind. For listening to me about Torres. For giving us all the appropriate ranks in the first place. We could have gotten stranded with a captain who actually thought it would be a good idea to throw us in the brig for seventy years. More realistically… I suspect more Starfleet captains than not would have kept us all crewmen, under permanent suspicion and assigned to scrub _Voyager_ ’s latrines. Yet you chose trust.”

“I do make it a priority to try and…choose that.”

“Yes, well, I think you proved that well enough today. Do you _always_ prove your principles with dramatic self-sacrifice?” he asks, a smile quirking the corner of his lip.

“Only on Wednesdays and Saturdays.”

That finally wrings a chuckle out of him. Relaxing his shoulders, Chakotay sinks down onto the edge of the biobed opposite. “I’ll take care to schedule crises only on Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Sundays, then.”

“What happens on Fridays?”

“Funny you should ask. Lieutenant Weissman from stellar cartography approached me the other day to see if she could hold Friday night holomovie screenings on Holodeck Two. I went ahead and approved it. As well as being good for moral, cramming a bunch of people onto the ‘deck at once seems like a good way to conserve energy. I’m still hopeful Torres will find a way to merge the holodecks’ energy with the main grid, and we don’t want to have frittered it all away on novels if she does…”

Janeway smiles. “Well, as captain, I’d be afraid to go myself. I wouldn’t want to put a damper on things for everyone else. But it sounds like a _wonderful_ idea.” She means it; the crew is going to need some ways to relax and blow off steam.

Chakotay frowns at her. “There’s no reason you—”

“Do I have a new patient, or just someone sitting on an _important medical instrument_ while _malingering_ in my sickbay?”

Chakotay sighs, sliding off the biobed as the EMH stalks toward them, waving a medical tricorder towards Janeway with an air of mild menace.

“I’ll go to the bridge for a final post-mission check-in.”

“Thank you, Commander.”

He smiles at her again, then squares his shoulders and strides out of sickbay towards the bridge, the very picture of a confident Starfleet officer—the good kind. She smiles down at her hands, listening with half an ear as the doctor lectures and marveling at the fact that only hours ago, she was wondering if he was actually the kind of officer she’d always taken pains to report, control, and avoid. If she had to be thrown across the galaxy and join forces with an enemy crew, she’s willing to thank any higher power that may possibly be in existence that it was an enemy crew led by him.

***

The chronometer on the mess hall wall reads 00:14. Gamma shift finished breakfast and made their way to their quiet posts two hours ago, and the mess hall is dark and deserted. Chakotay orders a cup of chrysanthemum tea from the replicator and makes his way to a table near the viewport, not bothering to activate the lights.

Though his first Starfleet posting was a Galaxy-class vessel twice the length of _Voyager_ , even the little Intrepid-class ship is a readjustment after the cramped days on the _Val Jean_. It feels strange, having different common areas for different purposes; a room just for dining that empties out between meals.

He wraps a hand around the hot mug, bringing it to his noise and inhaling the warm steam. Alpha shift is less than six hours away. He should be getting what sleep he can. But even after retreating to his quarters for a few hours of relaxation before bed, he can’t quite unwind.

The dangers of the last twenty-four hours aren’t anything he hasn’t seen before—though, admittedly, not in an unfamiliar quadrant, with no oversight or chance of backup. The conversation sparked by the unexpected mission is a different story.

It bothers him more than he wants to admit, the revelation that she’s been having doubts about him, just as he has about her. Oh, not that she and Tuvok still have concerns about the loyalty of him and his, or their potential for mutiny. That would be a given in any situation of a starship forced to absorb former enemies into its crew. Chakotay is certain Tuvok is putting security measures into place for just such a worst case scenario, and feels no hint of reproach at the thought. Hell, he has his own work cut out for him, keeping an eye on loose cannons like Seska and Jarvin.

No. Strategic concerns are a given. But he’d never even thought to wonder, as he stewed about the principle of the thing and mulled over his knowledge of Janeway’s values, whether she was entertaining similar questions about him. The realization that she has shouldn’t have been a surprise. Yet it was. And that, more than her concerns, gives him pause.

A lifetime ago, even grieving his father’s death, even with his own hands curling into fists, he’d made the effort to notice the tension in Starfleet Lieutenant Commander Ndukari’s hands and eyes, and to wonder at its meaning. He had heard through the grapevine about the captain of the flagship and his conflict with the admiralty over resettlements, and wondered how many other Starfleeters harbored anger or doubts—and why the _hell_ they stayed and carried out their orders, anyway.

Then he’d resigned his commission, and felt Maquis ships shake beneath him with the impacts of Starfleet torpedoes, and somewhere along the way, the question of “Why?” became less important and seemed so much easier to answer: The Federation leaders had cast their values aside, and the Starfleeters ignored their own principles to blindly follow orders.

He’d been so convinced of his own rightness that it hadn’t occurred to him that those who made the choice to stay and follow Starfleet orders might be acting on their principles, not discarding them.

He remembers his graduation ceremony from the Academy, the pride he felt standing on the stage beside new officers from planets, species and cultures from across the Federation, all vowing to uphold the principles of exploration, diplomacy, and peace. In his own way, it was those principles that led him to leave Starfleet, just as Janeway’s principles kept her there. Now that they all walk the same long path home, maybe the principles that divided his path from hers, and her crew’s path from his, have the potential to come full circle and bring them unity.

Even now, it feels like a big ‘maybe.’ But whatever the tomorrow holds, after today’s mission, he’s more certain than ever about at least one thing: if they had to be stuck at the other end of the galaxy with any Federation captain, they’re damned lucky it was this one.

_Sometimes difficult decisions will have to be made, but they’re made by people who have the principles of the Federation at heart._

Sitting in the mess hall of the Federation Starship Voyager, gazing out the viewport at the flash of unfamiliar stars, Chakotay smiles.

**Author's Note:**

> Though we know she was science officer on the Al-Batani and a commander on the Billings, I don't think we ever got the name of Janeway's first command, so I took the liberty of coming up with one.
> 
> I had way too much fun with the technobabble in this, all of which is 100% Stupid Fake Science that works Because Subspace. I was sort of trying to play around with the idea of quantum superposition and the old Schrodinger's Cat mindscrew: can two different realities really exist at once? (If you listen closely, you can hear the distant screams of people who *actually* understand the stuff I perverted into fake treknobabble.)
> 
> Edit: Forgot to mention this earlier, but one inspiration for this fic (along with my general feeling that the deeper differences between Starfleet and Maquis could've stood to be further explored) came from the original Writer's Bible for Voyager, the one from 1994 wherein Kathryn is still Elizabeth. I stumbled upon it courtesy of gloriousunderstanding.tumblr.com, and immediately knew I'd be riffing off this sentence: "He had known of her, heard of her diplomatic and tactical exploits, and realizes that if they were to be dumped at the ends of the galaxy with any Captain – they’re lucky it was this one."
> 
> All errors mine; please let me know if you see anything egregious! Thanks for reading :)


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